When Marketing Automation Fails

Marketing automation is one of the most valuable and powerful tools available to the modern marketer and salesperson. It can find and nurture leads, act as a personal assistant, lend a hand with some of the heavy lifting, and free up time and money so marketers can be their most creative selves.

However, as with any evolving technology, marketing automation has its pitfalls and perils. If marketing automation is not employed properly, it can be extremely detrimental to your overall efforts. In this article we’re going to discuss a few examples of what happens when marketing automation goes awry. Use these examples as a warning, and learn how to avoid them in your own campaigns.

Personalized Code Failures

One very common marketing automation feature that many marketers enjoy using is the ability to make custom salutations for emails. Even though this is a commonly used tool, it is still a nice way to add a little bit of a personal touch to emails. However, sometimes it can go horribly wrong.

No matter the testing that you put into your emails, things occasionally fall through the cracks. This is one of those things. Without detailed analysis of the code, there’s a chance that hundreds or thousands of emails might be sent out to your list that read, “Dear First name,” and nothing else. Your personal touch ended up making all of your emails feel very insincere.

Test your emails, and be familiar with the basics of the code if you are going to try and use custom name fields.

The Scheduling Fail

This one can end up not being that bad. In fact, there’s a slim chance you might end up learning something from this failure. I’m talking about the ever-popular scheduling fail.

It’s easy enough to do. You mean to schedule an email for 11am and accidentally schedule it for 11pm. It’s an understandable mistake. Unfortunately, you and your team have spent loads of time deciding when is the absolute most optimal time to send out emails. So, if you accidentally schedule them incorrectly you might miss out on an awful lot of customer interactions.

If this happens to you, the best thing to do is to try and glean some information from the accidental email. How did opens and click-throughs compare to the properly scheduled emails? Were certain metrics worse? Better? At the very least you can pick up some valuable insight into your scheduling.

These are just a few of the pitfalls that can be easily avoided with a little attention to detail. Marketing automation is easy to adopt, and tends to be very straightforward to use – but these common oversights seem to pop up again and again. So, pay attention to the details, and you’ll be amazed by how much marketing automation can do for you.

Let us know how marketing automation has (or hasn’t) worked for you. Have you had troubles adopting? Or did everything go smoothly? We’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments.